Please feel free to bail out now, because this is going to be a bleak, rambling, embittered screed.
Five years ago last night, my life ended. I went, in a very short time, from functional adult human being to a miserable lump of flesh distinguishable from a houseplant only by careful examination. In no time at all, illness robbed me of my limbs, hope, ambition, joy, independence and anything else that made my life worth living.
Let me explain. I had, apparently, cancer. That was a surprise, let me tell you. Multiple Myeloma, centered in my pelvis, was poisoning my blood with monoclonal proteins. My immune system responded by stripping the myelin sheathing from my peripheral nerves (POEMS Syndrome, if you feel like googling). I prefer to think of it as my self-loathing turning Meta. The practical result was that on the fourth of March, 2014, I got out of the car after driving out to my parents’ home in the country, took two wobbly steps and fell flat on my face. I have never walked unassisted again. Within a week I was in hospital, where I remained until August of that year being treated (thank you, Canadian Socialized Medicine) to the tune of several million dollars of diagnostic testing (some of my blood made it as far as California, I am told), radiation therapy, various drugs, blood filtering (my favourite) and physical therapy. I have been wheelchair-bound since.
By October of 2014 I was back in hospital because a fall shattered both kneecaps, the right ankle and some bone in my right foot. All told I spent just shy of half of 2014 in hospital beds. Except for the time spent with ionizing radiation sleeting through my body, or wrapped in very noisy magnetic resonance imaging tubes (I heartily recommend the Queensway Carleton’s MRI machine for the stockier individuals, Ottawa General’s MRI is noticeably narrower and less comfortable for the broad-shouldered and stout patient).
Since then I have also survived an autologous stem cell transplant (reinstalling my immune system from factory backups), but other than that I’ve managed to avoid hospital time. I am, to greater or lesser extent, “cured”. My nerves have recovered, at least as far as they are likely to. My fingers bend again, though not without tremors, weakness, trigger finger and other fun. My knees work again, but below that my legs are dead to me. I have zero muscular control of my ankles and feet, but on the plus side they still have full sensation (so I get all the pain and none of the motion, lucky me). This is as good as my recovery is ever going to get. It is, quite literally, all downhill from here.
What I have not avoided is suicidal depression, self-loathing, despair, bitterness, chronic pain, ongoing neuropathy and hatred. Medication to control my mood is an ongoing project for my various doctors. Thus far the practical result is to numb me to a point where I don’t spend an hour or so daily sobbing, short-circuiting my body’s ability to manage sugars to the point where I was diagnosed pre-diabetic last September (adding more drugs to my cocktail, and more side-effects of course), impotence (as if it matters when I haven’t looked in a mirror without tasting vomit in half a decade) and an inability to get a good night’s sleep.
None of my doctors are willing to help me end my life with dignity. Under Canada’s new laws (thanks Harper, you worthless amoral, sociopathic fuck, and you too Trudeau you traitorous, lying, cowardly, craven, middle-of-the-road piece of feculent shit) there is no room for someone as healthy as I am for assisted suicide. I could live another thirty years or more. That thought, voiced aloud, resulted in my exploring my knowledge of profanity across at least seven languages (two of them fictitious).
My family love me, in spite of my best efforts to put an end to that, and I know just how much my taking my own life would destroy theirs. If I did not, I would have opened a vein or hung myself or used all of those Fentanyl patches that failed to do anything for my pain years ago (seriously, that stuff is worthless) or else just crawled out into the snow to freeze.
I’m trapped. There is nothing I have found in this world that I love enough to make me want to stay. My ambitions are gone. The things I loved about life are dead to me. I cannot even keep in touch with friends because the pressure of acting human breaks me into jagged shards. I have no hopes left and no idea where other people find such things as hope, faith or optimism. I don’t know how to manufacture them, where to go looking for them, how to hang on to them. It’s like trying to gather mist while the sun is coming out. I can understand them, but I can’t hold onto them myself. I don’t have the trick of it. Or the ability for self-delusion, if that’s what it takes.
All I want from the future is a certainty of no more pain, no more fear, no more bad memories or nightmares. The ONLY certain means towards that that my mind can conceive is death. Oblivion seems like heaven to me. An end to laying awake remembering. An end to waking up to one more long, bleak, unpleasant day. An end to being dependent for the most basic needs on others, and so being a burden upon them (and upon the body politic to boot).
But no one loves me enough to want me to be happy. Everyone who says they love me or care about me is selfish enough to put their own desire for me to stay alive above my own desire to end. How fucked up is that? What a laughably hurtful Catch-22 I am caught up in. Yossarian would be impressed.
So pain. From dull aches to sharp, stabbing agonies. In the body and in the mind both. That is the last five years. That is my present. That is my future.
World without end, reprieve or rest.
I hate my life, and the worst thing about dying is just how long it takes.